International humanitarian law—rules that apply during a conflict between nations—state that one can’t attack civilians or civilian infrastructure. That could matter in space too. “You cannot target a civilian object. You can only target military objectives, and then you have to identify what those things are. A hospital or a school is always protected, but a bridge or a communication center might sometimes be military and sometimes civilian,” says Cassandra Steer, an expert on space law and space security at the Australian National University in Canberra and a speaker at the meeting. The idea of “proportionality,” which prohibits attacks on objects that mainly have civilian use and yield little
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